Sun Shows Off Vendor Support For Sun Cloud

Omer Trajman, Vertica senior director for cloud and virtualization, illustrated how a Sun Cloud user could establish a five-node version of his company's column-oriented database in the cloud. The Vertica Analysis Database for the Cloud 3.0 is a massively parallel system "perfect for deployment in the cloud," where multiple servers may be started and stopped, he said. Another startup, WebAppVM, demonstrated building a cloud application whose performance could be monitored and managed by the application owner from outside the cloud. The application may run on the application server of the builder's choice. WebApp is backed by Shasta Ventures and Sierra Ventures.

"We've only had Sun Cloud up for two months" and it's attracted a flurry of third-party activity, said Dave Douglas, senior VP of cloud computing.

Eric Baldeschwieler, VP of grid computing at Yahoo, joined Tucker on stage to say that Yahoo was experimenting with the Apache Software Foundation's Hadoop software, which implements Amazon-style MapReduce in open source code. Hadoop is a tool for plotting computer functions across a grid so that their execution takes place as close as possible to where the data they need is stored.

Baldeschwieler said Yahoo is running Hadoop workloads spread across 4,000 of Yahoo's 25,000 servers. "We run jobs that consider all the pages of the Web, building indexes and showing the relationships between Web pages," he said.

Hadoop-style workloads can be run in Sun's cloud as well, he said.

Sun hasn't opened up its cloud to customers yet, but Douglas said, "We're on track for broader public access this summer."

In response to an InformationWeek question after the presentation, Tucker said, "I can't say anything" about whether all of Sun's cloud initiatives will be intact and offered in the same form after Sun is acquired by Oracle. Sun officials must refrain from comment during the acquisition process. The acquisition was announced by Oracle on April 20 and is under way.

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This article was edited on 6/9 to clarify Mr. Trajman's title at Vertica.